MocoNews Interview with Greg Ballard, CEO of Glu Mobile

MocoNews interviewed Greg Ballard, CEO of Glu Mobile at CTIA.

From the post:

"Glu bought iFone for its brand portfolio: “It gives us some of the most powerful brands in mobile phones today,” said Greg. We also talked about how it affected a possible acquisition of Glu, but Greg didn’t seem concerned either way…”For us it’s less about exit strategies and much more about building in the long run a company that has choices ahead of it.”

Greg anticipates a lot more acquisitions in the coming few years. “It’s inevitable that there’s going to be some [acquisitions]. Some of the large players who are not in the business will start coming into the business and they’ll do so by acquisition, but not every acquisition is going to be a good acquisition,” said Greg. “My guess is that three quarters of the acquisitions that we see going forward will not end up being particularly strategic, but will be borne out of a sense of concern that they have to do something.”

“It’s harder to get people to buy games offdeck today than ringtones or wallpapers,” said Greg.

“Having said that the vast majority of games are being sold through the carriers today, and we have chosen to put the bulk of our energies into working with the carriers to work out ways to increase the usability and the acceptability of the experience of buying off the deck. For example we recently launched a games sampler that allows people to sample a number of games and then choose from among those samples which ones they would like to buy. We would prefer to spend our technical and marketing efforts directed towards where 95% of the games are being sold, the carriers.”